Paul Broca’s search for Basque skulls: The full story

Paul Broca surmised that the short and broad—brachycephalic—skulls of the earliest European settlers had become longer and narrower—dolichocephalic—in modern populations due to the blending of different races. Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius had two brachycephalic skulls said to be from contemporary Basque individuals, a claim suited to test Broca’s hypothesis. Broca worked with fellow anatomist and surgeon Pedro González Velasco, the founding father of Spanish anthropology, to gather a large number of Basque skulls. In its time, this was the most fascinating collection owned by the Anthropological Society of Paris. This article explains how Broca and Velasco were able to gather such a sizeable array of specimens, which they had collected at a location known at first by the code name of “Z.” Although Broca finally concluded that the origin of the Retzius skulls could not be determined, his research was to spark anthropologists’ interest in the language and origins of the Basque people.     

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on phrenology: Debunking a fad

ABSTRACT

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894) was a Boston physician, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and a writer of prose and poetry for general audiences. He was also one of the most famous American wits of the nineteenth century and a celebrity not bashful about exposing costly, absurd, and potentially harmful medical fads. One of his targets was phrenology, and the current article examines how he learned about phrenology during the 1830s as a medical student in Boston and Paris, and his head-reading with Lorenzo Fowler in 1858. It then turns to what he told readers of the Atlantic Monthly (in 1859) and Harvard medical students (in 1861) about phrenology being a pseudoscience and how phrenologists were duping clients. By looking at what Holmes was stating about cranioscopy and practitioners of phrenology in both humorous and more serious ways, historians can more fully appreciate the “bumpy” trajectory of one of the most significant medical and scientific fads of the nineteenth century.     

Gall’s German enemies

ABSTRACT

Franz Joseph Gall’s (1758–1828) proposal for a new theory about how to represent the mental faculties is well known. He replaced the traditional perception-judgement-memory triad of abstract faculties with a set of 27 highly specific faculties, many of which humans share with animals. In addition, he argued that these faculties are dependent on specific cortical areas, these being his organs of mind. After several years of presenting his new views in Vienna, he was banned from lecturing for what he considered absurd reasons. The edict enticed him to make a scientific journey through the German states, both to present his ideas to targeted audiences and to collect more cases. This trip, started in 1805, was extended to include stops in Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland before finally ending in Paris in 1807. For the most part, Gall was received with great enthusiasm in what is now Germany, but there were some individuals who strongly opposed his anatomical discoveries and skull-based doctrine. In this article, we examine the concerns and arguments raised by Johann Gotlieb Walter in Berlin, Henrik Steffens in Halle, Jakob Fidelis Ackermann in Heidelberg, and Samuel Thomas Soemmerring in Munich, as well as how Gall responded to them.